Dr. Harrison Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with appointment at the Beckman Institute and the Computational Science and Engineering. Dr. Kim’s research focuses on a variety of areas of complex systems design and large-scale computation and optimization. Dr. Kim’s current research topics are energy systems engineering; renewable, hybrid energy conversion and distribution; user-centered sustainable product design; product design analytics; multidisciplinary, multilevel optimization; green design. Application areas are automotive, consumer electronics, heavy-duty equipment, national security, commercial/military system of systems, and information technology. Dr. Kim has received numerous recognitions including the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award, Dean’s Award in Excellence in Research (Xerox Award), Best Paper Award in ASME Design for Manufacturing and Life Cycle Conference, and news media coverage in the USA Today and the Chicago Tribune. Harrison Kim earned his Ph.D. degree at the University of Michigan in 2001 in the area of Engineering System Design and Optimization in Mechanical Engineering under the supervision of Prof. Panos Papalambros. He joined the University of Illinois in 2005 after Business-IT consulting experience and postdoctoral training under Prof. Wei Chen at Northwestern University and has been leading the Enterprise Systems Optimization Lab.

Emerging interest in the renewable energy sources has garnered new contributions in energy systems engineering. Designing renewable energy generation systems, however, brings additional layer of challenges in that it is impossible to assess and predict exogenous conditions accurately. Hybrid power generation systems (HPGS), with respect to this challenge, can bring a new level of technical and economic performance of power supply by mitigating the effect of uncertainties. Kim’s team recently developed a new suite of systems design methodologies for single HPGS and hybrid energy farms that overcome non-smooth logical disjunction by use of multidisciplinary design optimization with complementarity constraints and various risk and reliability measures. The methods also utilize multi-stage programming model and design analytics capabilities for predicting system behavior in the near future time horizon. In this presentation, the speaker will present the findings from the recent studies sponsored by NSF and industrial partners (Caterpillar and Deere) in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) and introduce newly emerging topics in renewable energy systems engineering.

This afternoon, 8/13 Professor Judy Mitrani-Reiser will speak about critical care facilities in Nepal and how the earthquake on April 25th affected them.

The Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER), Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), and Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association reconnaissance briefing will be streamed live from the University of California, Berkeley from 2:45PM – 4:45PM EDT. Watch it live here.